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Magnolia Mound Plantation, located in Baton Rouge, was built around 1791. The home, still at its original location, sits on what was once a 900-acre Spanish land grant deeded to James Hillen in 1786. (Gazette photo by Claudette Olivier)

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Susannah Jones, a tour guide at Magnolia Mound, shows one of the many kitchen items common with the open hearth kitchens common on many plantations. The kitchen, which was built away from the home, burned at least twice in the planations’s history before the current reproduction was built. (Gazette photo by Claudette Olivier)

Timeless in timber

Plantation is Baton Rouge’s oldest wooden home

By: CLAUDETTE OLIVIER
Lifestyles Editor

A step into Magnolia Mound Plantation can take one back more than 200 years into Louisiana’s history, but the moment you set foot on the high ridge the colonial house rests on just east of the Mighty Mississippi, you step back more than 1.8 million years.
Susannah Jones, a tour guide at Magnolia Mound, said, “This ridge was created during the last Ice Age.”
Jones continued, “The house is surrounded by many live oaks, several of which predate even the home.”
Magnolia Mound Plantation, located in Baton Rouge, is the oldest wooden home in the state capital. The home, still at its original location, sits on what was once a 900-acre Spanish land grant deeded to James Hillen in 1786. In 1791, the property was sold to John Joyce, and he and his wife, Constance Rochon Joyce, built the house around that same time.
“John and Constance lived in Mobile,” Jones said. “This was an absentee plantation. John visits here but the plantation was run by an overseer.”
The original structure, built in the Creole Vernacular style, had a wrap around porch, four rooms and no hallway — residents walked from room to room. Each of the rooms had a set of doors that opened to the outside to allow for cross ventilation. The house was constructed of cypress beams with bousillage-entre-poteau and still has the original cypress flooring. The home was built high off the ground to prevent flooding and for a cross breeze underneath the structure.
Around 1804, John Joyce died en route from Alabama to Louisiana. Joyce was traveling by boat in the Gulf of Mexico, and he fell overboard and drowned.
“Joyce’s widow then inherited his plantation,” Jones said. “She was a widow with two children. She was French Creole and in the top of the three tiers of French Creole Society.”
Joyce and her children moved to Louisiana, and she eventually married French widower Armand Duplantier, who came to Louisiana to help an uncle who owned a plantation across the Mississippi River.
“Armand has four children of his own, and he and Constance have five more children together,” Jones said. “Around 1805, they make Magnolia Mound their permanent home. Armand begins to make changes to the home to what we see today. Duplantier wanted to bring more refined look to the home.”
A tour of the home today begins outside, and Jones said that paint colors on the outside of the home, white with green trim, are the original colors of the home, a fact learned through an analysis of the paint. When the wrap around porch was closed in, several rooms were added, including a bedroom, a dining room and an office.
Photos are not allowed inside the home because the owners do not want the furniture in the home to be reproduced.
The furnishings inside the home, including an armoire that belonged to Alberic Duplantier, one of Armand’s sons, show how a French Creole plantation house would have been decorated in the early 19th century. The home also has beds, a dining room table and sideboard, which features a lock drawer for spices, as well as personal items like a man’s shaving kit, which even features a wine screw and a ladies band box used to hold a hat, scarf and gloves.
Like the paint on the outside of the home, studies were also done to reproduce wallpaper in the dining room and parlor of the home. The living room wallpaper was reproduced from scrapings of the original wallpaper, which feature a single image reminiscent of a fleur des lis, and the dining room wallpaper, with images of peacocks and plants in greens, blues and reds, was reproduced from descriptions in letters from Constance and Armand.
“As mistress of the planation, Constance would home school the children for a while,” Jones said. “The girls learned things like basic arithmetic before being shipped off to boarding school to learn to entertain. The three girls sent were to the Ursuline Academy in New Orleans.”
Much of historic information shared during the tour comes from letters from Armand that were discovered at a Duplantier ancestor’s home in France. The letters are were donated to Louisiana State University Archives.
“We know from Armand’s letters that he sent three of his sons back to France for them to study how to be noblemen,” Jones said. “The sons do eventually come back to U.S.”
The parlor of the home features a cove ceiling, added when Constance and Armand remodeled the home, and it is the only cove ceiling left in the Mississippi Delta. The addition of the cove ceiling meant that upstairs room of the original home, likely a bedroom, became no more and stairs in what was likely the butler’s pantry, now lead nowhere.
Outside the home is an open-hearth kitchen. Through excavations at the site, it was learned that the kitchen building burned at least twice in the planation’s history, and the reconstructed kitchen is authentically furnished with vintage items like sugar nippers, an olla jar and reflector ovens.
“The house was almost torn down in the 1960s to build more dorms for LSU, but the preservation society stepped in and saved it,” Jones said.
The house won’t likely see another ice age, but it is well on its way to seeing another 200-plus years as one of Baton Rouge’s oldest homes.

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